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Searching... Palmerston North Central Library | General Fiction-Fiction Zone | COE | Book. | PN364650044734 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the bestselling author of Middle England and Mr Wilder and Me comes a brilliant new state of the nation novel
In the Birmingham suburb of Bournville, a family celebrate VE Day in 1945. With the joy of such an occasion there also come larger national questions about the nature of the horrific war the country has just been through. Following this family through generations as they navigate seventy-five years of drastic social change, from wartime nostalgia and English exceptionalism to the World Cup and coronavirus, domestic secrets and national myths leave characters and a country adrift, bewildered and divided.
Bournville is the story of who we are - at our worst, and best. From bestselling author Jonathan Coe comes a novel of rare humour and humanity, a novel that holds up a mirror to our past and our present.
Genre:
Domestic fiction. |
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
Jonathan Coe's 14th novel opens with a snapshot of recent history that will stir fresh and uncomfortable memories. As the Covid pandemic is descending on Europe in early 2020, thirtysomething Lorna, a struggling jazz musician, is on tour in Austria and Germany. Lorna's exhilaration at gigging overseas for the first time is tempered by a growing sense that the world is menaced by something extraordinary. It is both ominous and comic. Arriving in Vienna, Lorna can barely squeeze into her host's car beside the stockpiled toilet rolls. For the reader, there's an additional and more worrying dramatic irony: we can see that Lorna's overweight musical partner, Mark, will be particularly vulnerable to the virus. In Vienna, Lorna and Mark are taken to dinner by Ludwig, the owner of a small independent record label. A jazz fan and passionate anglophile, Ludwig is struggling to figure out what has happened to a nation he once admired for its tolerance, humour and self-awareness. "And now this same generation is doing ¿ what? Voting for Brexit and for Boris Johnson? What happened to them? ¿ What's going on?" Events since 2020 have only sharpened the urgency of Ludwig's questions. And the loving, funny, clear-sighted and ruminative examination of recent British history that follows might be considered an attempt to answer them. Bournville travels back in time from March 2020 to stage a series of tableaux in which we witness key moments in the lives of the nation and Lorna's extended family. The successive set-piece events show this family - and Britain - changing. Our first stop is 1945, where we meet Lorna's grandmother, Mary, as a child, on the eve of the VE Day celebrations. Mary's parents, Doll and Sam, live in the chocolate-manufacturing suburb of Birmingham that gives the book its title. There is warmth and humour in the portrait of lower middle-class life presented, but it's not sanitised. A strain of xenophobia bubbles up throughout the episode and climaxes in an act of violence that will echo throughout the book. This sets the pattern of the novel, which tracks Doll, Sam, Mary and other members of the family through six further landmarks: the 1953 coronation, the 1966 World Cup final, the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, the 1981 royal wedding, the death of Princess Diana, and the scaled-down anniversary of VE Day in 2020. As ever, prizing clarity over verbal fireworks, Coe's writing draws the reader into the family dramas as they unfold over the decades. He has the great gift of combining plausible and engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft. We see young Mary as child and then return eight years later to find her a young woman, struggling with a romantic dilemma and then settling into motherhood. We then join her children on family holidays in Wales, follow them into adulthood and watch all their lives intersect with the larger national events. Beat by beat, we're invested in their stories: which of her suitors will Mary choose? How will her own offspring fare? And although we know it's going to happen all along, it's still poignant and strange to watch young Mary gradually becoming Lorna's elderly Gran. Bittersweet as the eponymous bar of plain chocolate, the book ranges over a huge span of time, includes a large cast of characters, yet never flags nor confuses. It manages to squeeze in, among other things, the history of Bournville, European disputes over the labelling over chocolate, Welsh nationalism, the Festival of Britain, the launch of the Austin Metro and tensions over the European Union. As we leaf through the family album, there are touching jolts of recognition. It's hard not to be stirred by your own memories of the events portrayed and thoughts of your own family. Like the moving images in a zoetrope, Coe's snapshots invite us to notice changes and continuities, track growth and decay; the strengthening of some relationships, the failure of others. There are striking reverberations along the book's long passageways: unregarded turning points whose importance only becomes clear much later, echoes of behaviour, incidents that recur in a world that is the same but different. As the nation changes and the racial makeup of the family alters, it's not so much that bigotry gives way to tolerance, but that the ambiguities deepen. All along, we are reminded of the contradictory facets of the nation and of each individual character: the snobbishness that coexists with kindness, humour and narrow-mindedness, rationality and unexamined prejudices. When one of Mary's son's starts dating a non-white girlfriend, his grandmother Doll is disquieted. "'Do you treat her the same?' Doll wanted to know. 'I mean ¿ do you treat her the same as you would any other girl?'" This striking line is an unsettling and plausible combination of compassion and racism. The book also builds a deeper integrity out of echoes and motifs, like a piece of music. The phrase "all that caper", a particular corner of a Birmingham pub, a yellow cravat, a line of Latin verse, the sound of laughter in a school playground - all set off chains of associations that ripple throughout the novel. A piece of casual homophobia will be recalled decades later by a son trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. Subtle, considered, but not programmatic, Coe doesn't stick to any consistent aesthetic principle. He uses omniscient narration for some sections, first-person narration for others. There are bits in the past tense, bits in the present tense, chunks of news reports, extracts from a diary, a long reminiscence by a recurring character from one of his other novels. None of this sophistication makes the book less pleasurable - quite the reverse. It combines a welcoming accessibility with a box of clever narrative tricks. It struck me that there is something hopefully British about the book's flexible approach to narrative. There's no theoretical doctrine underlying it. The decisions are made, moment by moment, on the basis of what works, what is clear, what is engaging, and what best serves the story. In the end, while the novel can't explicitly allay Ludwig's disquiet, its compassionate and undogmatic approach to its characters and craft embodies a set of values that give some grounds for optimism.
Kirkus Review
One family's odyssey spotlights England's transformation between VE Day and the coronavirus pandemic. Just south of grimy industrial Birmingham, Bournville was established in the late 19th century by the Cadbury family as a model village with healthy housing and amenities for the workers in their chocolate factory. It's there in 1945 that 11-year-old Mary joins a celebration of the European war's end that introduces her to her future husband--and to the bigoted nationalism that will contend into the next century with a more expansive view of Britain's future. In 1953, she becomes engaged to stodgy, conservative Geoffrey Lamb around the time of Queen Elizabeth's coronation; it's the second in a series of iconic events on which Coe hangs his exploration of intermingled societal and personal change. By the time of the England-West Germany World Cup final in 1966, the Lambs have three sons with very different personalities and outlooks. Eldest Jack has Mary's outgoing nature but shares Geoffrey's values; by the end of the novel, he's a Brexit supporter and admirer of Boris Johnson. (Johnson flits around the fringes of the story, seen first as a joke and then revealed to be a shrewd manipulator of social anxieties.) Quiet, deliberate Martin--married to a Black woman, to Geoffrey's open dismay--works for Cadbury; his efforts to get English chocolate certified for sale in the European Union provide a hilarious scene of E.U. dysfunction. Youngest son Peter, a musician, finally acknowledges that he's gay during the period of turbulent emotionalism surrounding the death of Princess Diana, an episode of national hysteria that most of the Lamb family (except Jack, of course) regard with bemusement. As Coe follows his richly characterized cast across 75 years, he hews to the venerable traditions of the English realistic novel, capturing Britain's increasingly diverse, cosmopolitan society in the varying reactions of his characters. The pandemic-restricted commemorations of VE Day's 75th anniversary bring this pensive novel to an appropriately sober close. Perfect for readers who appreciate thoughtful and substantive fiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Coe's (Middle England, 2019) elegiac ode to British history of the past 80-odd years is told through the lens of a single family, that of Mary Lamb, a fictional portrait loosely inspired by Coe's mother, who passed away during the pandemic. Mary's life coincided with a seismic cultural shift during the latter half of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first. The real-life town of Bournville, located just outside of Birmingham, was founded by the Cadbury family, Quakers who wished to provide an ideal community for employees of their famous chocolate factory. Each section of the narrative is built around a momentous occasion in the nation's history. Mary was a young girl on VE Day and recalls the pride and patriotism displayed by the county's citizens. Coronation Day, England's victory in the 1966 World Cup, the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and the latter's tragic death serve as subsequent checkpoints. Mary's family reflects the sentiments of the changing national ethos, schisms that tear at the fabric of the whole. A poignant delineation of tradition and progress.
Library Journal Review
The enlightened planners of Bournville, a model village on the outskirts of Birmingham, England, envisioned a place that would not only house the workers of the Cadbury chocolate company but also enrich their lives with parkland, gardens, and green spaces for exercise and good health. Mary Lamb, whose father works at Cadbury, makes her first appearance at age 11, sitting by the radio listening to the king and Winston Churchill proclaim VE Day. She is last seen in failing health, struggling to connect with family on Skype during COVID isolation. In the years between, Mary works as a music teacher and raises three sons with a narrow-minded husband whose racist and homophobic attitudes don't soften over time. VERDICT Bookended by the events of March 2020, when the world went into pandemic lockdown, the novel lands lightly on the major happenings of British life, from the queen's coronation to Diana's funeral and the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Coe (Middle England) deftly encapsulates 80 years of British history in this tender portrait of a woman, based on his mother, who lived through it all.--Barbara Love